I refused to weep. Instead, body thought
About samhita, how it meant well-made,
Composed, and I decided to compose
Myself. The sky was tremulous, dark,
And spitting occasional hail. Nothing
Is less actually meaningful than weather,
Which at most can only be made to predict
Itself, but nothing feels more portentous.
I had come with the cows to shelter
Under the cottonwood trees, to bellow.
I thought of all those early herding peoples,
My transoceanic ancestors among them,
Their passionate deification of storms,
Their terror of what lurked in mountains,
Deserts, woods, oceans, how they glorified
Lightning personified, how it slew
The wilderness for them, fire and light.
Whatever we once had to do with woods,
We're children of smiths and alchemists,
Fired clays and metal edges, terror now.
There on the edge of almost-scraped clear
Canyons of elk and condors, absent wolves,
Former haunts of antlered deities and voices
Whispering out of the mouths of rocks,
While the veils of late-winter snow dragged
Blank scrims across receding ridges,
I also thought of that one hunter who fled up
Into the Alps, wearing and carrying the kit
Of metallic civilizations to come, idiot,
Trying to escape the only-human arrows
That lodged in his lungs and bled him
As he lay in the snow and froze, alone.
Not lightning, not any sky god, not any
Lord of cultivation saved him, but the dragon
Of ice and wilderness enfolded him
And protected him as a talisman to scare us
With thousands of years later,
With thousands of years of getting better
At playing dragon-slaying children of heaven
Under our belts. If I could have found
The winged and still four-legged serpent,
The air snake, the ocean monster, I would
Not have taunted it, tried to stab it, I would
Have told it, I hope you coil around this hymn
Of mine, no better than all the others before
That boasted triumphs of well-made things,
Of our weapons and gods, jewelry, buildings,
Containers, hearths, verses, and rituals,
And crush the last breath out of it, Vritra.
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